o dreary, so remote from reality, that one cannot even dimly imagine
the frame of mind which originated it, and still less the mood which
fed upon such things.

Yet I very much doubt if the aims, ideas, hopes of man, have altered
very much since the time of the earliest records. When one comes to
realise that geologists reckon a period of thirty million years at
least, while the Triassic rocks, that is the lowest stratum that shows
signs of life, were being laid down; and that all recorded history is
but an infinitesimal drop in the ocean of unrecorded time, one sees at
least that the force behind the world, by whatever name we call it, is
a force that cannot by any means be hurried, but that it works with a
leisureliness which we with our brief and hasty span of life cannot
really in any sense conceive. Still it seems to have a plan! Those
strange horned, humped, armoured beasts of prehistoric rocks are all
bewilderingly like ourselves so far as physical construction goes;
they had heart, brain, eyes, lungs, legs, a similarly planned
skeleton; it seems as if the creative spirit was working by a
well-conceived pattern, was trying to make a very definite kind of
thing; there is not by any means an infinite variety, when one
considers the sort of creatures that even a man could devise and
invent, if he tried.

There is the same sort of continuity and unity in thought The
preoccupations of man are the same in all ages--to provide for his
material needs, and to speculate what can possibly happen to his
spirit, when the body, broken by accident or disease or decay, can no
longer contain his soul. The best thought of man has always been
centred on trying to devise some sort of future hope which could
encourage him to live eagerly, to endure patiently, to act rightly. As
science opens her vast volume before us, we naturally become more and
more impatient of the hasty guesses of man, in religion and
philosophy, to define what we cannot yet know; but we ought to be very
tender of the old passionate beliefs, the intense desire to credit
noble and lofty spirits, such as Buddha and Mahomet, with some source
of divinely given knowledge. Yet of course there is an inevitable
sadness when we find the old certainties dissolving in mist; and we
must be very careful to substitute for them, if they slip from our
grasp, some sort of principle which will give us freshness and
courage. To me, I confess, the tiny certainties of science are f